Julie, your Post-Colonial reading of White Noise is an interesting one. I too noticed that Jack seemed to be keenly aware of the ethnicities of those around them. However, I didn’t take it quite as far as you. Isn’t there a difference between recognizing your doctor’s ethnicity (even if Jack uses ethnicity as the principle identifier), and refusing to see a doctor who is not white? By this I mean, Jack doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, as you write, “inabilities to understand and accept the ‘foreign’ goods, services, and people that he encounters,” for he does accept their aid. Rather, he seems to identify these people and products by their nationalities. Furthermore, this novel’s treatment of race can’t be boiled down to a white\/other binary. Of all the characters, Germans are perhaps the most exoticised people with their dry spit and harsh sounding tones. I guess what I’m saying is that I think this piece is more complicated than Said’s Orient\/ Occident split. <\/p>\n
Instead, I would argue that White Noise is a novel of invasion, whether it is by media or people. I think you are right to point out that Jack notices that his world is changing, becoming more and more “foreign,” but at what point does DeLillo suggest that Jack sees the “infiltration of ‘the other’ to be an affront to his security and dominance as a white American man”? I agree that Jack is becoming Xenophobic, but this fear of the foreign is not limited to non-whites. When does Jack’s ethnicity become an issue? Isn’t the greatest invasion the non-descript “foreign” matter that enters his body? <\/p>\n
I hope that we have time to discuss this in class, for I would be very interested in hearing you speak more about Mr. Grey. You argue that he embodies an “Ethnic Other,” yet the reader (not to mention Jack) only learns this at the very end of the novel. And even then, we are unsure as to his ethnic identity. Doesn’t the name “Mr. Grey” simply suggest an unknown? <\/p>\n
Perhaps I am wrong. After all, he insists that his “bland diet” should be the key to his longevity. Not to mention the fact that he has built a career around the study of Hitler… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Julie, your Post-Colonial reading of White Noise is an interesting one. I too noticed that Jack seemed to be keenly aware of the ethnicities of those around them. However, I didn’t take it quite as far as you. Isn’t there a difference between recognizing your doctor’s ethnicity (even if Jack uses ethnicity as the principle … Continue reading Is Xenophobia Racism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}